Can you imagine a time when the truth ran free
by Alexia Blackbriar
Summary: Missing Scene 3x20 "The hell you talking about?" Lance snarled. Diggle slowly stood, radiating rage as he told him in a low voice, "Thea was stabbed through the chest with a sword by Ra's Al Ghul. Oliver was the one who found her. She's in the ICU on life support. They're not sure she's gonna make it." And all at once, Lance's life came crashing down around him. Posted on AO3.


"Where is he?" Lance demanded as he marched through the hospital furiously towards where Felicity and Diggle were seated on the waiting chairs outside one of the rooms. "I need to speak to him."

Felicity rose silently and then said quietly, warningly, "Now is not the time, Captain Lance," as she glanced about at the people scurrying past them worriedly.

"Like hell it is. Where the hell is Oliver Queen?" Lance barked angrily, towering over Felicity and making her flinch back slightly. "He slipped the cops I had watching him, illegally I might add, and that means I can pull him into custody again. So where is he, Miss Smoak? Better tell me before there's another casualty for your team."

Felicity had been bristling, enraged and looking ready to punch him throughout his whole little speech, but as soon as Lance finished with that last sentence, she deflated and shot him a morosely sad and upset look, one that clearly conveyed all her emotions.

"What, hasn't Oliver suffered enough, Captain?" she said tearfully. "Are you so consumed by hate that you want to punish him more? Are Roy and Thea the first in your long planned line of victims in Oliver's life? Am I gonna be next? Is Digg? Is Laurel?"

"The hell you talking about?" Lance snarled.

Diggle slowly stood, radiating rage as he told him in a low voice, "Thea was stabbed through the chest with a sword by Ra's Al Ghul. Oliver was the one who found her. She's in the ICU on life support. They're not sure she's gonna make it."

And all at once, Lance's life came crashing down around him.

He was filled with absolute horror as he realised that, while Oliver losing Roy had proved to the kid that the people around him were victims of his crusade, Oliver losing Thea was going to tear the kid apart by the seams. Lance swallowed; sure, he had lost Sara, but Oliver had lost his dad, his mom, his best friend, Sara and now, was going to lose his sister, his last connection to Starling City.

And go figure, days ago Lance himself had basically been working with Thea Queen's stabber to take down her older brother as the Arrow. That technically meant that Lance was partially at fault.

After he had arrested 'The Arrow', there had been an instant uproar. Fan clubs and civilians rose up in protest of the imprisonment of the vigilante, and businesses and coorperations threatened to withdraw their financial investments from the SCPD. Three quarters of the city had been catagorising Lance as the villain, and the Arrow as the hero; the last quarter was the criminal side and they were delighted. Then, when Roy had been killed in prison, the SCPD had been attacked; investments were withdrawn, officers were assaulted on the streets, the police scanners were hacked. Anybody on the anti-vigilante force immediately became a victim of hate crime.

If the media got wind of Thea Queen being stabbed, they would call it the police being negligent. They would say that the police knew that Thea was going to be a target for the criminals of the city who had grudges against the Arrow, who wanted to attack the Arrow, because she was Roy Harper's girlfriend. The SCPD and Captain Lance would be finished.

It wasn't those thoughts that plagued him, however. Diggle had said that Oliver had found his sister, half-dead. How long had Thea been alone, slowly dying from her wound, before her brother had found her? How would Oliver have felt when he discovered his weak, stabbed and blood-covered sister, inches from death?

Lance didn't know what to say. Finally, he just asked, because damn, he needed to know, "How's Queen holding up?"

"I don't think you're at liberty to ask, Captain," Felicity hissed.

Lance nodded to the door. "He in there?"

"Why would I tell you anything?" Felicity growled, her eyes flashing.

At that precise moment, Oliver walked around the corner, striding towards them and the room that held his critically injured sister. Lance felt his scarred heart clench painfully when he saw that Oliver's eyes were completely dead and cold, and the way he was holding his body was closed off, as if he had been destroyed from the inside out. Felicity instantly rushed towards him and took his hands, walking backwards with him as Oliver continued on to his journey to Thea's room.

"The smoke signal?" Diggle questioned shortly, not offering Lance any explanation to what he was talking about.

"Maseo," Oliver replied in a clipped tone. God, even his voice sounded dead, flat and cold and emotionless, though Lance knew that really, Oliver should be breaking apart piece by piece.

"What, did he come to gloat?" Diggle seethed.

"No," Oliver responded, but not elaborating any further. He finally looked Felicity directly in the eyes and asked unflinchingly, "Is Malcolm still in there?"

"Yeah," Felicity murmured sadly. "He hasn't moved."

"Malcolm?" Lance repeated, alarm bells triggering in his head as his heartbeat instantly leapt into overdrive as he released what the team had just essentially revealed. "As in Merlyn? Merlyn's sitting in there with your sister?"

Everybody ignored him. Lance tried not to feel offended. Diggle just shook his head. "I must be seriously messed up for feeling sorry for a psychopath. But I can't help but see him at the moment as the guy who just lost his daughter."

"We haven't lost her yet," Oliver snapped.

"You might as well as, man. There's no way Thea's coming away from this unaffected."

Oliver closed his eyes and inhaled a shuddering breath, his mask finally falling away and immediately Felicity yanked him in to embrace her, soothing him by rubbing one hand along his spine and the other coming around to cup the back of his neck. Lance felt as if he was intruding on a very private moment.

"I don't think I can go back in there," Oliver said, his voice cracking. "I don't think I can see her like that."

"She'll be fine, Oliver. She's a survivor, just like you, right?" Felicity said, trying to lift the mood a little.

"Maybe not." Oliver's head dropped. "The doctors don't think she's going to hold out. They want me to sign a form giving permission to take her off life support." At Felicity's gasp of horror, Oliver continued, "Of course I'm not gonna do it. I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I didn't even give her a chance."

"And Merlyn would be after your ass for eternity," Diggle piped up. "Oliver, what's the plan? And don't say you don't have one. I can see it in your eyes, man, and I don't think we're gonna like it."

Oliver looked at him carefully and then, pulling away from Felicity, he turned away and said, "Stay here. I've got something I need to do."

"Oliver," Felicity said, alarmed, trying to follow.

"Stay here," Oliver ordered, whipping back around to fix her with a glare. His eyes softened when Felicity flinched. "Please just stay here, Felicity. Stay with John and Malcolm. I don't want you getting hurt. If you died too then I would as well."

"Don't say that," Felicity whispered, close to tears.

"I have to," Oliver said, sounding pained. "I have to say it, Felicity. Because I've lost Roy, I'm not sure whether or not I'm gonna lose Thea... I can't lose you too." He turned away, heading for the exit. "Stay here."

"Oliver, wait, man." Diggle heaved a sigh when the man paused. "You can't drive like this, man. You'll get yourself killed. You won't be able to concentrate, won't be able to control your bike and next thing we know, it won't just be Thea in the ICU, it'll be you too. Somebody should drive you."

"You have to stay here with Thea and Felicity," Oliver responded insistingly.

"I'll drive him," Lance found himself saying. God help him, what was he saying? He hated Queen. He wanted him behind bars. But he couldn't help the offer rushing out of his mouth. He just felt so goddamn guilty. Seeing the suspicious, furious looks Felicity and Diggle shot him, he snapped, "I'm not gonna arrest him, for god's sake. His partner's dead, his sister's life is hanging on the edge, I ain't that cruel. I'll make sure he gets to where he needs to go in one piece, alright?"

Felicity looked uncertain. "Oliver…"

"Felicity," Oliver interrupted. It was evident that the two of them could have conversations by simply stating each other's names. "It'll be fine. I trust Captain Lance."

"You shouldn't," Diggle said darkly.

"No, I shouldn't," Oliver agreed. "But I know that if anything happens to me while I'm with him, you, Felicity, Laurel, maybe even Team Flash, would retaliate and make his life absolute hell, so much so that he wouldn't even see the point in living anymore." Oliver turned his dead eyes on Lance and the captain bit back the urge to shudder. "I trust him not to do anything rash while I'm with him, because he knows what the consequences will be."

As Oliver turned around and strode off around the corner out of sight, Lance quickly followed, only glancing back to offer Felicity and Diggle a quick nod to relay that he would watch the kid. Felicity nodded back while Diggle just glowered.

Oliver was standing patiently next to the passenger door of his cruiser when he arrived in the hospital parking lot. As Lance unlocked the car, the archer slid silently into his seat and leant backwards, tipping his head so his closed eyes were facing upwards unspeakingly.

Lance didn't know whether he should be worried that the kid looked too exhausted to talk or relieved they weren't having an awkward conversation. The captain wanted to lash out, smack Queen in the face with cruel, taunting words that his sister's condition was somehow his fault, that Queen deserved all the bad things in his life, but he found he couldn't. Oliver Queen suffering wasn't ending up being as satisfying as he thought it would be. Instead, it seemed tragic and heartbreakingly awful.

Lance wasn't surprised when Oliver requested cordially to be driven to his sister's loft. It took only twenty minutes and the journey was spent in frigid silence. When Lance pulled up to the building, Oliver clambered out without so much as a thank you. On any other day it would have pissed Lance off to no end, but today he knew that the kid was lost in his thoughts, grieving and suffering, and it didn't bother him as much.

"I'm sorry about your sister, Queen," Lance said. It wasn't an apology for the man hunt, for what happened to Roy, for everything Lance had put Oliver through, but it seemed to be enough.

"Yeah, I am too," Oliver replied roughly, slamming the door of the car behind him.

Lance clambered out of the driver's seat without even thinking. Locking the car, he tailed Oliver, joining him in the lift as the security guards barely spared him a second glance and took a quick look around the loft as Oliver entered, evidently with something of intent on his mind.

The captain immediately felt sick as he spotted Thea Queen's blood smeared over the floor, a dropped, smashed phone and the glass of a coffee table shattered, shards littered everywhere. The glass crunched under Oliver's feet as he walked, vanishing up the stairs without saying goodbye.

Curious, Lance wanted to follow the kid but figured that would be too much of a breach of privacy. Instead he stood in silence and listened carefully. There was the comprehensible sound of stuff being dragged around and hangers being stripped. Lance's heart sunk. Exiting the loft, leaving the door unlocked behind him, he hurried back to his cruiser.

He dialed speed dial four on his phone and was greeted by Felicity's frosty voice three seconds later. "Listen, I'm pretty sure Queen's either trashing his room at his sister's place or he's packing and running off somewhere. It just dawned on me that him asking you two to stay at the hospital wasn't just to keep an eye on Thea, it was to keep you out of the way. He's leaving, I don't know when, I don't know how, but he's leaving soon and I figure you might want to stop him before that kid does something he'll regret."

"You know, Captain, for a second there, it almost sounded like you cared," Felicity replied.

"I don't," Lance replied, his throat tight as he swallowed, casting a glance up to where he knew the loft to be on the building. "But you do. So get over here and stop him from leaving."

Felicity gave a dark chuckle. "Who would've figured you being the one wanting to keep Oliver around in Starling City? After all, I thought the whole point of you outing him as the Arrow was to - oh god."

"What?" Lance responded, eyes narrowing.

"He's packing? You said Oliver's packing. Oh no. Whatever Maseo said to him must have convinced him that the League would - John, we need to get to Thea's loft, like, right now!"

"Miss Smoak?" Lance urged.

"Nothing. It's nothing. Well, nothing that concerns you anyway." A beat passed and then she said, " _We'll stop him._ " She hung up. Lance wasn't bothered that Felicity didn't thank him. He was realising that he didn't derserve it anyway.

As Lance drove away that night, he finally managed to realise that that was probably the last time he was going to see Oliver Queen, at least in a while. If Oliver was packing, then that meant that he had a plan to go somewhere, and when Queen plans were set in motion, they were impossible to halt. He felt a vague spark of hope jolt in his chest that the archer's team would be able to stop him from doing anything stupid before he tore his life apart by the seams and made it impossible to stitch back together again.

Lance closed his eyes. Oh god. He was concerned for Oliver Queen. He was worried about the kid.

 _God help him._


End file.
